What Is, Isn't?

JD Vance comes to Europe

Poor Chicken Little, after everyone ignored the little guy for so long, saying he was exaggerating, that what the fascists were saying was only electioneering, peanuts for the gallery, not to be take seriously...
And then came Vance to Europe to let everyone know that they are playing for keeps. Not only are they dismantling the little saftey net built over the decades in the United States, but that they want the same for Europe too. In this week's Camino a Ítaca a Japanese kitsune fable. When will the enchanted be able to see the foxes for what they are? Will it be too late? Click over to read the originally published version in Spanish the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The landscape unfurled like an ancient scroll painting, revealing a world cloaked in the pristine silence of winter as a farmer named Tadahiro, one of those sturdy tillers of the soil who formed the backbone of feudal Japan, was walking home. The snow in Hokkaido is unlike anywhere on earth— it falls in a blanket so thick that it seems to muffle the very air, as if the gods themselves had hushed the world.

Then to his wonderment, through the settling snow came the most magnificent parade he had ever witnessed. The lantern-bearers came first, their paper lights casting pools of golden radiance across the whiteness. Behind them processioned ranks of samurai in silk hakama, their sword hilts gleaming. Musicians followed, their flutes sending haunting notes into the winter air. The gifts came next - lacquered boxes bound with silk, their contents worth more than a farmer would see in a thousand lifetimes. And there, at the heart of this splendor, moved the bride herself, her wedding kimono so fine it seemed to float above the snow.

As Tadahiro let this assembly pass, his old friend Taro happened upon the scene. What followed was one of those moments when reality itself seems to split along its seams. For where Tadahiro saw nobility and splendor, Taro saw only a troupe of foxes, padding through the snow with twigs in their mouths.

"Have you lost your senses?" Taro demanded and then mumbled something, watching his friend bow deeply to what appeared to be nothing more than common forest creatures. "They're only foxes!"

Taro’s harsh words acted like a spell-breaking charm. In an instant, the magnificent procession dissolved like melting snow, leaving only a line of foxes trotting through the snow, carrying nothing but sticks that Tadahiro's enchanted mind had transformed into all the trappings of a noble wedding.

Japanese kitsune legends remind us that sometimes the veil between worlds is as thin as a snowflake, and reality itself might depend entirely on who is doing the looking.

These mischievous foxes still have the power to enchant. Just recently, the branches in their mouths spelt out in enormous letters a headline in the Economist, “Spain shows Europe how to keep up with America’s economy.” It then ranked it the best performing economy of the OECD based on performance in the last year. 

Yet even though the Economist isn’t precisely known as radically left-leaning, enchanted right-wing commenters steadfastly believed the pablum spooned to them by the Spanish conservative press. They assured that the country had banned private property and was two small steps away from becoming a bankrupt Maoist dictatorship.

Their confirmation bias simply wouldn’t allow them to see the foxes for what they were. They weren’t seeing a cadre of billionaires and their evil minions openly moving to gut the Welfare State. Instead of seeing things like Milei’s chainsaw for what it is, a tool designed to take away their pensions, socialized medicine and education and do away with limits on working hours and minimum wages, they saw a magic wand that was going to make them too wealthy and upwardly mobile. Just like hardworking Abascal and his patriot friends.

Just what did Taro mumble that broke the spell?

San Cristóbal in Montánchez, Spain

Castillo de Montánchez

Longform read published in the February issue of Perceptive Travel Magazine. (click over)
A family trip to a curious festival where the blessed are not the meek, but in fact their modes of transport.

"The sweep before us was more than 180 degrees. The savannah, some 1300 feet below, rolled off into the far-off confines of the horizon and was fringed with the blueish humpbacks of breaching sierras. The checkerboard of holm oak trees that made up the dehesas pixelated the undulating topography of differing shades of green and parched beige. White specks of small villages broke up the scene like tiny errors on a tactile screen."

The Gulf of Fragile Masculinity

It has begun, even on this side of the Atlantic. The pernicious slide into self-censorship has started to happen in the press. Lately I have been publishing my Camino a Ítaca articles in Spanish, as always, in the HOY but have also been publishing them in English in the SUR in English. But it seems that this week's was a step too far for the outlet in English and they decided not to publish it. 
True, it could be for other reasons, but unfortunately it seems clear that it was done not to rock the boat, precisely when the boat desperately needs to be shaken up. I'm afraid it's not coming, it's already here. Click over to see the Spanish version in the HOY, who were brave enough to publish it or read the longer, condemned piece in English below.

Rising up in the southeastern corner of Türkiye, the toothy Zagros mountains briefly zigzag like the hose of a hookah pipe down the partition dividing the Kurdish lands of Iran and Iraq. They then cleave through the eminent domain of the Ayatollahs until the chain withers out in the barren deserts bordering one of the world’s most vital sea passages, the Strait of Hormuz. From its southern flanks the arid plains of Marvdasht unroll like a dusty Persian carpet that blankets some of the most ancient settlements known to humankind.

Some 60kms to the northeast of Shiraz, a series of broken columns rise out of these plains, standing as a mute testament to the transience of imperial ambition. The pulse of history once beat here in Persepolis. The Achaemenid Empire ruled an estimated 44% of the population on Earth. Hollywoodized rulers like Cyrus the Great, Darius and Xerxes issued decrees from these ruins that were felt as far away as modern-day Crimea, Afghanistan and Somaliland.

Today only the wind polishes the bas-reliefs that lead up the grand stairway to the empty audience hall. Sumptuously robed figures from 23 nations are depicted bringing precious gifts in tribute to the absolute despot. Elaborate yet subjugated ambassadors frozen in stone while contributing the wealth of their nations to a deified foreign ruler. A ruler that himself would be subjugated in 330 BCE by another apotheotic King. A ruler named Alexander.

Fast forward to today and we see the return ofsupposed Roman salutes. There are rumors of gigantic orange phallus sightings around the world. Romanesque fetishes, erected in tribute to an autocrat promising a return to expansionism and greatness, no matter the conflicting reports given by the prostitutes and pornstars he paid off.

From the Casa Rosada to the Via Appia and the Calles Genova and, of course, Bambu, far right leaders and wannabe autocratical satraps are falling over themselves for the privilege to climb the White House steps and kiss the ring.

These sycophants will do anything to indulge the petulant tangerine tyrant, even if it means eschewing their national interests amidst his threats of protectionism and raised tariffs. They share a religious conviction that the Orange Clown’s return is a victory against wokeness and the perceived ills of empathy and political correctness. For them, only he can put the genie back in the bottle and time warp the West back 70 years to when everyone knew their place.

Back to a time when you could openly mock the disabled, when the only ‘good’ immigrant was one that didn’t dream of a day off, when women had to get their husband’s permission to get a passport and bled to death from coat hanger injuries in dark back rooms. A return to when it was socially acceptable to expound racist views and a time when the past was narrated as a single story complete with good white guys and bad dark guys.

But genies are non-returnable. Freedom once tasted isn’t so easily relinquished. The decent majority will realize that this movement wasn’t in fact about the price of eggs, but something much more sinister and this crass episode will just become another Darius in the dust.